A recent article about prostitution in Amsterdam revealed for me the stunning hypocrisy of the modern Left, and the way they are happy to use an argument AND its reverse, when it suits them.
It’s merely the latest in a long line of such hypocrisies, so I have a few pieces planned in the same vein.
Part I is called Sex & Death, because it looks at their views of prostitution and abortion.
So the mayor of Amsterdam is telling us that prostitution is an embarrassment.
To her personally – she finds it “unpalatable”
And on that basis alone, she plans to legislate it out of existence.
But here’s the problem. When politicians ban things not because they have a mandate from the voters but merely because of their personal preference, they have become tyrants – they are using their own views as a proxy for what the electorate wishes to happen, without asking them through the democratic mechanisms.
And when they do this, it’s a big problem, because we know what happens when people are denied by legislation something that they really want – the practice goes underground.
It’s the argument used by fans of pugilism to keep boxing legal, and its also the argument that underpins criticism of the War on Drugs – banning drugs has merely enriched criminals and endangered users.
Oh, and it’s the argument that progressives use to keep abortion legal.
We are told by progressives that if we ban abortion, it will put women’s lives at risk as they are forced to seek back-street abortions.
But here we are being told that legal prostitution should be banned.
Won’t that also cause women’s lives to be placed at risk, as prostitutes are forced to ply their trade on the black market rather than the free market?
Forego the testing for sexually-transmitted diseases, the monitored environment, the regulated industry. Go back to heroin addicts giving blowjobs in dingy alleyways?
Remember, the black market is merely the free market denied – people usually don’t stop a practice just because some politicians tells them to. Even when that politicians uses the force of the State to punish those who do it.
They simply takes their peccadilloes off Main Street and into the back streets.
So just as the pro-choice lobby would tell us abortions must be kept legal to safeguard the lives of mothers, should not prostitution remain legal to safeguard the lives of prostitutes?
Presumably Ms Halsema is not so stupid to believe that people will stop wanting to pay for sex just because she tells them she disapproves? Or that women (and men) will stop exchanging sexual services for cash for the same reason?
So endangering women is acceptable AND unacceptable? Progressives want women on their backs in nice safe clean abortion clinics, but on their knees in perilous filthy backstreets?
Maybe it depends on how you feel about sex and death?
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Maybe Ms Halsema could imagine herself or one her family or friends wanting an abortion, so it needs to be safe and legal for (whatever the Dutch equivalent of Jocasta is). But prostitutes are common oiks and nor her type of person at all so they don't deserve the protection of the law.